Useful Desktop Applications

Just some useful applications that I grew fond of over the years.

Note that this list is rather old. As of June 4th, 2025, I permanently switched over to Linux (Mint and Kubuntu).

Cross-Platform Applications

  • Anki (Desktop, Web, Phones): Quizlet on steroids. Ask your friends in medical school if you need any convincing.
  • Blender (Desktop): Free and open-source 3D-Modelling tool with a massive community support.
  • Briss (Desktop): Allows cropping contents out of .pdf files. Very useful if you need to extract high quality items from these files (e.g. figures from research papers).
  • draw.io (Desktop, Web): A very easy-to-use and free diagram making software.
  • Element (Desktop, Web, Phones): Basically Discord, but free, open-source, and ridiculously private. This is federated and encrypted, so only you and your recipient have access to messages.
  • Firefox (Desktop, Phones): The only major non-Chrome based browser. This is especially important since Firefox supports ad-blocking better and there are numerous add-ons to significantly upgrade performance (such as returning YouTube dislike counts, removing YouTube ads, stronger privacy protection, etc.)
  • Inkscape (Desktop): Free and open source vector drawing application. Extremely useful for drawing diagrams, editing PDF files, and vector art.
  • Joplin (Desktop, Phone): Minimal yet versatile note taking software with encryption and usability with ANY cloud storage (Google, OneDrive, Nextcloud, personal, etc.). This is similar to Obsidian, but is free and open sourced.
  • Kdenlive (Desktop): Easy to use and minimal video-editing software.

Windows-Only Applications

  • Chocolatey : Application downloader and manager. Similar to `apt install` on Linux. Extremely useful for multiple downloads and mass updating applications. In fact, many of the applications listed here can be installed via chocolatey.
  • Carnac: Shows keys pressed on screen. Useful for doing tutorials.
  • Ditto: Stores clipboard history. Allows easy copy-pasting multiple items.
  • (Search) Everything: Literally allows searching everything for something, without ANY noticeable loss of computer performance. Highly recommended, especially if you are disorganized.
  • Handbrake: Easily change media file formats, trim, compress, etc. Very useful if you make videos and need a smaller file size out of them.
  • Image Glass: A much better and faster photo viewer.
  • Lively: Live desktop wallpapers. This is similar to steam, except that it is more minimal, supports audio, and you can make CUSTOM wallpapers. FOSS.
  • PowerToys: Significantly upgrades functionality of your Windows machine. Adds MANY features ranging from color picker, unit conver sion, math, web and computer search, window tiling, and so so so much more, all done minmally and with few key presses. This is the one item that should be definitely used on a regular basis. FOSS.
  • Quicklook: Allows quickly viewing an item WITHOUT opening it. Useful for quickly viewing a pdf document, an image, etc., without opening an application for it.
  • ShareX: Screenshot tool with lots of features. Can be a bit too many features for some people.
  • SumatraPDF: Very lightweight PDF viewer. FOSS.
  • Waifu2x-caffe: Image upscaling and denoising. Useful if you download low quality images and wish it was better quality. FOSS. There is also a web version.
  • WinCompose: Allows inserting special character very easily (e.g., I can type ≠ by using alt and = and / in sequence).
  • yt-dlp: Command line youtube (and other) downloader. FOSS.